


many gods and many voices

by Amber



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Horror, Do Not Archive, Drowning, Forced Isolation, Implied Jonathan Sims/Isolation Monster, Isolation, Kidnapping, Losing Control Over Powers, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery Process after Torture, Sea Monsters, Stockholm Syndrome, Tentacles, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unrequited Elias Bouchard/Jonathan Sims, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-15 05:22:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16056389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amber/pseuds/Amber
Summary: Jon must bind himself to the creature in the sea, and spend a part of each year in isolation with it.Peter Lukas sails him there.





	many gods and many voices

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fairbanks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairbanks/gifts).



> > Scholars tell us  
> that there is no point in knowing what you want  
> when the forces contending over you  
> could kill you.  
> ( Louise Gluck, _Persephone the Wanderer._ )
> 
> (This was mostly written before MAG 118 and posted before MAG 120. Therefore, it contains spoilers for some parts of S3 but not for the three-part S3 finale, and should be considered a canon-divergence.)

The air of _The Tundra_ is thick with rust and salt, as though its decks are washed with blood. It's the cargo crates, empty and unmoved, the sharp sea air eating away at them as it brushes past. It whispers through the holes and chains and spaces between two crates, playing haunting songs. The wind is the only companion Jon has had on board since he awoke.

It's four days before he meets Captain Lukas for the first time. He's leaning over the railing, considering the dark waters churning far below, at the base of the cliff-like curve of the ship's side. 

"Don't jump," says Peter, and Jon does jump, but only in the sense of a startlement, a flinch. He whirls. Peter leans up against the white-painted rail alongside him. He is broad-shouldered and neatly tailored, his pale skin almost translucent in the high noon sun.

"I suppose this is your doing," Jon accuses waspishly. Peter spreads one hand, mouth curved up at the edge, cutting a deep line across his face. 

"Dunno what you could mean, Archivist," he says.

"Don't give me that," says Jon. "I know who you are. This is your ship, and you've kidnapped me, trapped me in some — some emptiness dimension. I know there's somebody actually sailing this thing —"

"Is there?" Peter responds, deliberately enigmatic. "So you're saying rather than believe the ship doesn't need a crew, you think the crew is present and it's just you who can't see them."

"Someone's cooking the meals," is Jon's argument. He won't be caught out. "And therefore someone's manning the navigation." 

"You've been clinging to that, haven't you. That you're not actually alone out here, because there are signs of people, even if you can't reach them." He grins. "Nice. Archivists are always such fun."

Jon bristles, turning back to his contemplation of the water. "And for your information, I was never going to _jump_ ," he informs Peter huffily.

"Just an interesting view?" Peter sounds like he couldn't care less. "Anyway — and I really do enjoy getting to tell you this — you're wrong."

"About the crew?"

"About the kidnapping," says Peter.

It's nonsense. Jon had awoken here, belowdecks in a small windowless room. On the floor, his trunk with some few possessions — the same basic necessities he'd travelled around America with. The last thing he remembered before that was being at the Institute, alone in his office in the Archives, working late. Lukas must have caught him by surprise and whisked him away while he was knocked out.

"Sorry," says Peter, and he doesn't sound particularly sorry at all. "Elias must have neglected to tell you." He touches Jon's shoulder, very lightly but still a sudden invasion of space. "Come have a drink and I'll explain everything."

This is the first person he's seen in days. This man has his life in his hands. Even if the touch makes Jon want to cringe away, he knows he should at least demonstrate friendliness, or deference, or even tolerance. What he manages is a crisp, "No, thank you."

"Suit yourself," says Peter, squeezes his shoulder, and leaves. And then Jon's alone again, the sensation settling over him like a physical weight.

-

The fog is:  
\- Thick, a physical weight in the lungs and on the skin, creeping into all the cracks, past the cuffs and collar.  
\- Dark, so the sweep of it blots out the sky.  
\- Scentless, or almost scentless (there is a hint there, in the back of Jon's throat, of something acrid, but perhaps it's just his own bile).  
\- Dry-cold, even though layers of clothing.  
\- Everywhere.  
\- Everything.  
\- Endless.

Jon doesn't can't quite seem to orient himself. The tape recorder in his hand feels like a lifeline somehow, like it connects physically to something that can reel in and fish him out. It clicks and whirrs in his white-knuckled grip.

Something curls around his ankle.

He starts, and it follows the movement of his leg, a sensation sliding higher, a snake. Probing the cuff of his pants and up his leg and he yells and— 

Something presses into his mouth— 

Something ropes like a noose around his throat— 

Something dips between the buttons of his shirt— 

Muscular tentacles, not rubbery but petal-soft over a firm, shifting core, like a snake wrapped in latex. They're cold, mindlessly seek the crevasses of Jon's body that are still warm. God, god, it's on his thigh. Jon closes his eyes and— 

The closest verb is _prays_.

When the tape recorder hits the water it shorts out, crackles into death, and Jon can't summon another muffled scream, and everything goes quiet.

\- 

"Statement given, um, June 12th, 1989. Date of recording, December 5th, 2017. Martin Blackwood— Jon? Jon!" Martin's voice is high and shaky as he nearly knocks the statement and recorder to the floor in his hurry to go and greet the man. "Oh my — oh my god! Hi!"

"Hello, Martin," Jon says, somehow managing to sound both dismissive and longsuffering.

"Wow - I had no idea you'd be in today. None of us — I mean, you've been gone for three months without a word! I was, we were all really worried. I mean, Elias said you were fine? And I guess he'd know? But at the same time. You know. Nobody actually _trusts_ Elias."

"Martin," says Jon stiffly. "Thank you but I'm fine. I simply had business that took me out of London."

"Since... September," says Martin slowly, dubious. "Right after the Unknowing. Without a word to anyone?"

Jon swallows. Feels the places his teeth press against each other. He promised himself he wouldn't do this anymore; he is making an active choice to trust his assistants. To trust _Martin_ , who is looking at him with desperate expectancy, longing for a reason not to be angry.

"Yes," says Jon. "Is Elias in?"

Martin exhales, shoulders slumping, voice despondent. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, um, he gave me a statement to do this morning, so he's here somewhere, I guess."

"Thank you, Martin," says Jon, and even he can hear it sounds more like a dismissal than a kindness.

-

Elias is in his office, and Jon enters without knocking. Shuts the door behind him — no slamming, he is not a child — and then locks it so that they won't be disturbed. Apparently Elias is willing to allow this, because he lifts up the phone and dials through to the front desk: "Rosie, I'm unavailable until further notice."

Jon is willing to wait until he hangs up before unleashing: "You!" he starts, spluttering. It's hard to even know where to begin.

"Hello, Jon," Elias says calmly. "Sit down, will you."

"I will _not_ ," Jon responds sharply. "This isn't a meeting between colleagues, Elias. You had me _kidnapped_. You let me be—"

He comes to an abrupt stop, like he's just noticed he's at the cliff-edge of something terrible, some dark chasm of the mind. Elias sits back in his chair, eyebrows raising, hands clasped.

"Yes?" he says, mild but encouraging. "Go on."

"You let me be _tortured_ ," Jon snarls, his voice so quiet, so, so restrained. He can taste his own bile, and there's an edge of seasalt to it. Elias doesn't seem perturbed.

"Is that what it was?" he responds. "Perhaps. Why don't you be more... hm. _Specific_."

"Specific!" shouts Jon. "Oh, I'll _give_ you specific."

-

This deep he has tinnitus, one constant note in the background of his mind. It's the only solid thing — everything else is muffled and impossible. This deep, there is no real light, and the water is black, black, and the pressure is all around and over him, and the cold is so complete that he has stopped shivering. This deep, it seems natural to be cold, and crushed, and alone.

Does it feed him? Sometimes there is blood in his mouth and he doesn't know whose.

Does it feed on him? Sometimes the terror is so complete that it, like the cold, becomes normal. He cannot process that he is afraid anymore, his adrenaline as deadened as his nerves.

Is it touching him? Did it even really have the power to touch? Or were the tentacles something his mind invented rather than face the impossibility of what The Lonely's creature actually is.

It would be impossible, of course, for someone to survive like this for long. But he loses track of time. His suspension here seems interminable. He isn't breathing, his lungs burning and vision swimming with the lack of oxygen, but he never quite reaches that point where need overcomes sense and he drags freezing water into his lungs.

The sound of the creature when it speaks is a long, low noise, a foghorn that vibrates upwards so slowly it takes a week, whale noises pitched just below the range of human hearing. Despite the fact that it's a terrible bass sound, Jon finds it strangely comforting, as though the noise itself is enveloping and protecting him from the water. He is swaddled in that sound, and with it comes a _knowing_ , a terrible knowing of other people's stories, of other lonely men and women who have been lost out here — given over to nothing so that nothing might build itself a form. 

He can still hear it in his dreams, that noise — that impossible, mournful cry of something that will never be understood even by an Archivist whose entire point and purpose is understanding — the soothing aching bass of it, cut through with one single ringing note of his eardrums singing.

-

"Tell me," Jon demands of Elias, his voice skirting brokenness, "Tell me what I did to deserve this. Tell me how this could possibly be a _choice_ I made for myself? What albatross did I kill for you to—"

"What albatross?" Elias interrupts suddenly. Until now he's mostly ignored Jon's tantrum with his usual elegant silence, drinking in each furiously-spat description of pain, but now his eyes are stoked coals. "You know exactly what this is a punishment for. You brought us Gerard Keay, Jon. A man whose knowledge Beholding has craved for years, all bottled up in that _page_ and desperate, willing to do anything. To tell us. Anything. And then what did you do." He shakes his head, sighs. "What _albatross_ , Christ, you are not one of Coleridge's sailors. You were simply given over because you needed a little more help becoming. You survived because you became."

"Became _what_ ," demands Jon, snippily with an undercurrent of fear.

Elias exhales softly. "That is the question, isn't it," he says, looking at Jon, hands dropping loosely to his lap, something ravenous in his eyes.

-

He comes to on the deck, a wet limp mess, and Peter Lukas is stripping him roughly out of his clothes.

What Jon thinks is: ?

There are no particular words or phrases, just a vague percentage of his emotions dedicated to being displeased at this turn of events even as the rest of him gibbers and shrieks at the violence of air on his skin, and the sky, god, there's so much sky, and gravity pushing him brutally down into the deck, too solid.

Lukas peels off his clothing (and Jon only feels ? about it). Examines him fairly handsily, though nothing indecent despite the fixed smirk, and then calls: "Thaddeus! Here a moment, will you?"

The great big boatswain comes over: "Captain."

Peter stands, and then picks Jon up in his arms, not particularly gently despite what he says as he hands him over to Thaddeus: "Carefully does it. He's in a very delicate state right now. Find him a cabin — one of the solo ones. Make sure he's comfortable, covered, and the room is warm. Maybe have some food and water sent — use whoever you need to help you, just get it done fast."

Thaddeus seems very faintly surprised by these requests, but he proceeds with them. Jon only thinks: !

"Nobody," Thaddeus says to Jon as he tucks him into bed like a worried mother, "Nobody has ever come back from the fog alive." Jon recognizes terror, in the whites of his eyes and the shake of his voice, and it whets something in him. He wants to sink his teeth into it, drag it out into the light, and shake it sharp to break the neck.

"You should be dead," Thaddeus tells him, and makes a sign to ward off the evil eye. Jon licks his lips slowly, tasting the rime of salt.

\- 

Jon isn't sure when he realizes the thing has no distinct form. That the tentacles exist but can shape themselves and unshape themselves as needed, black and formless but not quite liquid. Maybe when it worked its way into his body. Perhaps just the way it undulated itself as a response to the pressures of the deep. Certainly it was before it parted itself and enveloped him as if in soft tar, the protoplasmic mass engulfing him entirely. 

The creature is not eating him — if it has a stomach, or can form a stomach, that is not where he is. Instead, and this he remembers as viscerally in dreams as he experienced it in life, it cocoons him like a uterus, blocking out all other stimuli. No more pressure, or burn; Jon is simply floating in nothing. No limbs, because he cannot move and the creature feels like nothing, now, a far cry from the firm strength of when it took him. Nothing exists except for the black substance surrounding him as thoroughly as air or water, and his sense of self — and that latter is cracking.

There was a time when he thought he knew loneliness. As an Avatar, an Archivist, separate from the people he watched. Separate even from his assistants. All his life he's been an outcast, struggled to make a connection with others, and then the monstrousness of Beholding othered him further, and he had been so, so achingly lonely and scared. 

None of that compares to this. A loneliness so intense that there is nothing else in the universe — just the infinite, careless empty. He cannot sleep, and he cannot speak, and his brain has gone so long without oxygen that he feels barely functional even in thought.

But there is one thing, one tenuous thread of connection that he remains certain in: he is alive, and he lives because he is the Archivist, and the Eye is a force external to himself. And if his experience is transmitted wordlessly into Beholding, then perhaps somewhere out there, far away in an office in Chelsea, Elias Bouchard experiences the horror of deprivation too.

-

"Becoming what," Jon asks him again, and this time the static is a roar, and it isn't _tingly_. Elias doesn't shiver with pleasure and smirk like he's deciding whether or not to give an answer. His lips part, brow pinching, and he grunts.

"Jon," he says, strained. Puts his palms flat on the wood of his desk as though he plans to press it down into the floorboards of his office, into the earth.

" _Becoming what_ ," Jon asks again, and it tears from his throat, sharper than just the acidity of nearly vomiting, more inhuman than breathing salt for months, and it's needles and it's blood — yes, blood, the words have physically cut him and he spits it onto Elias' desk, a red spray of contempt. It splatters paper and keyboard and wood and the backs of Elias's hands and still Jon asks again: "What am I becoming?"

"This," says Elias, because he has no choice, his pale eyes full of worship. "This."

-

Peter Lukas perches on the end of his bunk. He has the affectation of a small, neat man, one leg crossed, but the bulk of a sailor beneath his tailored uniform. His skin is far too pale for his line of work, and his eyes are hollow as he watches Jon. All of these details Jon feels like he has to relearn, somehow, as though he's looking at Peter for the first time.

How long has he been in this room? He remembers other men, blurry shapes — it's hard to conceptualize people as real. Blankets. Needles? A doctor? Thaddeus, yes, there had been Thaddeus, and hands holding him down, tentacles coiled tight around — no. No. That hadn't been real. Just people. There were just — how many?

Peter is very real, though. "You're awake," he says mildly. "Good. Drink more water."

With a shock Jon realizes he's in pain, as though his brain has only just now deigned to bring his nervous system online. It's everywhere; his skin itching like a rash, his joints and muscles screaming, his spine heavy and legs immobile. His sinuses are on fire. He gasps, and tenses up, and makes a subhuman little sound.

Peter sighs, like this is an inconvenience, but there's also something interested in his expression. He gets up, and gets the glass of water, and brings it over, cups the back of Jon's head in an intimate gesture and helps him to drink it, small sips. It feels strange and too-familiar on his tongue, but also clean somehow. Cool and clean.

"God," he rasps hoarsely, because he hurts. It's impossible to escape how much he hurts. It's an alarm intruding on every thought. 

He's never felt pain like this — oh, he's had minor aches from bad posture or the flu, and of course he's been injured, the worms and the wax-woman, Daisy's knife and Michael's hands. He's had Mike Crew make his brain think he was falling and he's all but experienced death alongside his statement-givers. But this is beyond any of that. This is the kind of pain that slides into the cracks of the mind and fills all the spaces, pushes out cognition and personality and logic and everything else. Just pain. He can't even summon the energy to scream.

"Help me," he begs Peter Lukas, who just laughs and puts the glass on the nightstand.

"You don't think I have been? We're heading back to London as fast as we can, Archivist. Ship's doctor can only do so much."

"It hurts..."

Peter slaps him suddenly, brutal and calculated, enough to set Jon's ears ringing all over again. But the pain is somehow sharp and hot and identifiable, and it knifes adrenaline through him, so though he gasps he finds it immediately degrees more manageable. Closes his eyes, brow furrowed, and doesn't thank Peter Lukas — but doesn't scold him either.

"You've got the bends," Peter informs him. "That's what you get for diving without a suit, yeah? I don't have a hyperbaric chamber on board, but I wouldn't worry too much. You survived down there for a long time, Archivist. An impressively long time. A little decompression sickness is nothing."

Jon moans softly, and when he opens his eyes Peter's dark gaze makes him shiver. "He told me you were powerful," he says, and then stands with a smirk and a single backwards glance. "Failed to mention you were cute. You look good when you're hurting, Archivist. No real surprise you've got all those scars."

-

"Why did you give me to the Lukases," Jon demands, and Elias gasps — good. It's his turn to choke.

"It was necessary. They needed something from us — a debt repaid." Elias rubs a hand across his face. He's choosing his words carefully now, forced into honesty but still trying to hold things back, even as the compulsion sweeps through him like a torrent and carries pieces of himself away with it. "Peter — needed another Avatar to bind to the creature. So it wouldn't consume him. And we're allies, we've always been, wagons hitched to each other's stars. He asked, and I know he asked to hurt me, and yet I promised... I knew you would survive it."

"You couldn't have told me?" Jon responds in disgust. 

Elias laughs, humorless. "Would you have agreed, Jon? What if you had hurt yourself too badly fighting it, running from it? What if you had brought our life's work down around our ears?" Jon can't tell if he is using a royal we or speaking mistakenly as if the two of them are a team. Perhaps Elias means he and the Eye. Perhaps there isn't any difference between the Eye and Jon, now. But he's still speaking, Elias, justifying himself in his usual condescending tones: "Better to wait until it was all too late."

Jon wants to hit him. He could do it, lunge across the desk and bloody the curve of that asshole's wide mouth, knock the smiles right out of it. Even if he saw it coming, he thinks Elias would let him. Has an instinct about it. But what good would it serve?

"Fuck you," he says politely instead, and leaves. He has more questions — he always has more questions. But he needs time to process, and he won't give Elias the satisfaction of breaking down in front of him.

A cigarette. He needs a cigarette, and the reassuring sound of London traffic to drown out the ringing in his ears.

-

Jon hears the _Eleanor Rigby_ whistling coming from his office before he actually sees Peter Lukas there, sat in Jon's chair with his bright white sneakers on the desk. It's strange to see him out of his crisp captain's uniform, in just jeans and a tight t-shirt, a few days of salt and pepper stubble colouring his jaw. Jon considers turning and leaving, but Peter spots him and grins, waves a jaunty hand in greeting.

"Hullo, Archivist. Started to think you might not be coming in today."

Jon huffs. He'd had... trouble, getting ready this morning, had stood too long in the muffled heat of the shower until it went abruptly cold. Sometimes that happens now, his mind drifting back to that dark and impossible suspended state while his body goes on without him. It's not like the nightmares he has of the statements; it's worse. Visceral, participatory, and sickeningly longing, like a part of him _wants_ to have nothing to concern itself with.

"Elias doesn't like me to work too much overtime, so sometimes I leave early or arrive late," he informs Peter brusquely, and then, "Not that it's any of your business." It's hard to say if Peter believes him, brows lifted in amusement. "What do you want," Jon remembers to ask belatedly. He doesn't mean to use his compulsion, but there it is, scorching like ethanol across his tongue.

"Oh? Just came to see how you were getting on," Peter tells him, eyes lidding.

Jon makes a short _hm_ sound. "Get out of my office," he decides, sharp.

Peter grins. "Aw, c'mon now, don't be like that. We're in the same predicament, you and I. You know that, yeah?" Jon folds his arms, implacable, but Peter continues undeterred. "I've only been down with it once, when I was a kid. My brother, he's bound to the house — Moorland House, do you know it? Ah, I see that you do. Must be a fair bit about us in these statements of yours. That doesn't really sit comfortable with my family, but, can't be helped. Even donating as much as we do to you and yours doesn't manage a _total_ exemption clause."

He finally swings his legs off the table, stands. Somehow managing to be menacing despite his affable demeanour, he crosses around the table and inexorably into Jon's personal bubble. "But I digress. I was saying how nice it was to have someone else in my predicament. I doubt you plan to start throwing humans its way, of course, but you will still have to spend time down there, and therefore you'll have to spend time with me. So I think we should be friends." The way he says friends makes the word mean something else, somehow.

Jon looks disconcerted, thrown by the revelation that the Lukases apparently aren't done with their expectations of him. "I'm not sure... I..." He'll have to spend time down there. Lord. Lord. Hadn't he spent enough? His mind is whirling, but he gathers enough of his pomposity around himself to manage: "I wouldn't have thought 'friends' were something a Lukas was particularly interested in."

"Ha!" says Peter, more an exclamation than a laugh. "Yeah, maybe. Most of us don't like most people. But I'm not like most of my family — and you're not like most people. Besides, you can be isolated even surrounded by friends, Archivist. But you'll figure that out for yourself soon enough."

He claps Jon on the shoulder, and.

-

They're both near to naked; Jon too out of it to complain, and Peter shameless about it. He's swathed them both in blankets, tight around the curl of their bodies together, chest to back. Peter's skin feels unbearably hot, like Jude Perry's handshake all over again, and what's worse Jon can feel that he's aroused, cock stiff against the back of one of Jon's thighs. He whimpers, and Peter's arms tighten around his chest.

"You awake yet?" he asks. Jon groans in response. Peter sighs, a warm puff of disappointment against the back of Jon's neck. "Wish you'd get it together, Archivist. We could have some real fun, I think."

Jon clears his throat despite the way that feels like swallowing razors. "Not interested," he rasps out, and Peter chuckles.

"Fair enough," he agrees cheerfully. "I can wait until you are. I prefer a willing partner, you see. But I'm afraid I'm still going to have to touch you." He slides his big hands down the front of Jon's body, and Jon cries out because his skin feels so strange and sensitive. Peter doesn't go lower than his navel, and he isn't gentle, as he starts to rub warmth and circulation back into Jon's limbs. "There," he murmurs, "Is that really so bad?" And god, god, what else can Jon do but be grateful — that he isn't cold, that he won't be raped, that he isn't _alone_ —

-

But when he comes back to himself, he is in fact alone. Standing in his office with no concept of how long since Peter Lukas left him there.

-

"What did he mean, I'll have to spend time down there," Jon demands like battery acid, holding absolutely none of his power back.

"You can't trust Peter Lukas," Elias manages, and when he lifts a hand to rake through his neat hair Jon is gratified to see it _shaking_.

" _What did he mean_."

"Stop," says Elias, horrifically helpless. "Stop or I won't be able to control myself. Christ, please understand that your compulsion is —"

"What," snaps Jon. "Painful? Good." He wants Elias to hurt. A newly-vicious part of him wants everybody to hurt, as though that might make his own psychological injuries ache less.

"No," says Elias, and his voice has dropped half an octave, and his hand has dropped below the desk, out of Jon's line of sight. His pupils are dark. "Jon," he says warningly. "Control yourself."

But Jon doesn't know how to do that anymore.

"Answer. My question," he repeats, and Elias _groans_ , and Jon knows then that it isn't in pain. Or if there is pain it's the kind that lances adrenaline below the abdomen, the kind that sparks tension and builds heat. And perhaps Jon knows a little about that, perhaps there have been times, in the past, where he found the freedom and relief of letting someone take him apart with hurting, but it never quite ticks over into sexual, and he's never wanted to be on the other side of it. And yet here he is, and he finds masochism _breathlessly_ fascinating on Elias Bouchard. He watches with avid, unblinking interest as the muscle in Elias' bicep works in slow pulses, his pale eyes now closed. Tracks the way his breath is coming more rapidly, shifting the expensive material of his high-buttoned work shirt. The hint of pink starting to spill like a watercolour across Elias' cheekbones.

"Are you getting off on this?" Jon asks, though there's no judgement or disbelief in his tone. Just a flat question that sparks from his mouth to — wherever Elias is feeling it. Wanting to humiliate him by making him answer aloud what they're both already aware of.

"Yes," Elias admits, and then looks up at Jon with a wrench. "Are you, Archivist?"

"No," says Jon honestly. He also isn't sure that matters. "Now tell me what you've promised the Lukases on my behalf, or I'll have you make a mess of yourself in your office."

He's never been one for threats. Usually he's the threatened. Strange, how easily this one rolls off his tongue. Elias seems to be considering his options — perhaps, Jon thinks, he's miscalculated, and the man wants Jon to keep asking him questions until he can fall over the edge. He wonders, idly, when the last time was that Elias had sex. (He wonders if Elias had touched himself like this watching Jon beneath the ocean, drowning in darkness.)

"It's a Persephone contract," Elias says. Takes the pause between them to suck in oxygen, try and straighten himself back into poise. "Three months of a year. Every year."

"Until?" Jon asks, trying to keep the tone human, finding it's more difficult than he thought it would be.

"Until?" Elias gasps. "Until you find a different Avatar to feed it, or enough warm bodies that it forgets about you. Or until you die."

"Or I break the contract," points out Jon, and Elias shakes his head.

"He'll come for you," Elias says, finally putting both hands back on the desk. He closes his eyes. Saying the name seems to cost him something. "Peter Lukas."

-

In the months leading up to the next September, Jon can feel himself becoming more and more unhinged. He feels as though some integral part of him has been made alien, and though the rest of his mind/body has yet to reject it, the sense that it does not belong fills him with unease. 

He disassociates during perfectly ordinary tasks. Buying milk and coming to clutching the jug of it in the park, staring down at a duck pond. Working at his desk and then being suddenly in Archival Storage, old boxes around him as if he's been searching the statements. He finds an email open on his desktop that just repeats no, no, no, unsent because it was unaddressed. Despite looking into what this could mean in his spare time, he cannot find any sort of trigger, can't identify any other symptoms of panic or fear. Sometimes he is simply Not.

"I'm fine," he tells his worried assistants. "Not sleeping well, that's all." That's been true since he got the job.

"I'm fine," he murmurs to himself, as he checks over his haggard expression in the mirror for signs of the inhumanity he feels gestating inside him.

-

In August, he runs. Despite Elias' warning. Despite the other dangers escalating at the Institute, the Lightless Flame's interest in Tim, the appearance of Julia Montauk in London, the coffin sitting in Artefact Storage. Despite it all, he moves his savings to a different account and buys a plane ticket to Greece and he _runs_. He has never been a brave man.

-

"Perhaps this time you'll want that drink?" asks Peter. He's sitting in the chair next to Jon's bunk, leant forward, hands clasped, expression easy with amusement.

Jon nearly hits his head on the top bed when he sits up, recognizing the movement of _The Tundra_ immediately, though the sickening lurch that goes through him has nothing to do with the motion of the ship on the sea. "How did I— you— I was in a different _country_ , there's no way anybody could have—"

"It was you or me, Archivist," Peter says with a little shrug. "And I tend to be a bit self-interested. Comes with the territory."

Jon collapses weakly back onto the bed, his mind buzzing. The denial that he has so often used to cushion the blow of reality has very little to grasp right now: he cannot commandeer a cargo ship. Perhaps he could leap over the side and swim, but he suspects Peter would simply fish him out and carry on. They are travelling unerringly to the territory of the creature, and it will take Jon again, and there's simply nothing he can do about it. Hopeless. Things are hopeless.

"You're scared of it," he says, the words emerging before the thought has even completed itself in his head. It seems obvious, now he considers it, and he turns his head to look at Peter curiously, letting this interesting tidbit drown out all the too-human despair. "Why—"

"Ah ah ah!" Peter says suddenly, sharp reprimand, his eyes flint. "Finish that question and you'll regret it. I'm not interested in giving you a statement. Maybe on the trip home, if you really need one, I'll get one of my crew to tell you a story — Thaddeus has some good ones. But never — _never_ — compel me, or the next time you go down there I won't fish you out. Got it?"

"Yes," Jon agrees, a little flustered. "I— yes. Sorry."

"Apology accepted," Peter responds, demeanor shifting mercurially back to jovial. "It's all right, Archivist. I know you can't help yourself. Addicts never can, yeah?"

"I'm not," starts Jon, and Peter shakes his head.

"'Course you are. That's what being an Avatar _is_. No secrets between us, you see. So yeah, I'll tell you, and not your boss: I'm scared of it. Being scared of it is what we're for. Most of my family, they love The Lonely. They've lost all their humanity, perfect tools of isolation and distance. But that means they don't fear it. They don't carry out and experience the very essence of it like I do. They're the nouns, Archivist. We're the verbs."

Jon isn't sure what the difference is between that information and a statement, but it does settle him somewhat. Being compared to Peter Lukas would have unnerved him once, he thinks.

"You mentioned," he says cautiously, "Something about a drink?"

-

He's still rum-drunk when the fog comes, the only escape he could see. 

He'd sobbed when Peter had left him alone on the ship, stumbling past stacks of empty cargo containers trying to find where he was certain they must all be piling into one of the lifeboats, but whatever it was Peter did to keep him from the crew on their long journeys out to sea, he had done it some more, and Jon had not found them. 

They're out there, though, on the ocean. Men and women paid thousands of dollars to wait on a little lifeboat and listen to him scream, their only answer the dolorous sound of the Boatswain's Call. 

And after that, the fog. And after that, silence.

-

"Do you think Elias is watching us?" Peter asks him, three months and a lifetime of unspeakable horror later. "Probably. He's so overprotective of his people." 

That probably shouldn't be what gets Jon to wriggle his numb body around in the too-small bed and press his cold lips to Peter's, clumsy, but it is. Peter goes very still, like he didn't expect that, and then he bites hard enough that when he pulls away laughing both their mouths are bloody. 

The pain is good. It sears like a knife through everything that's wrong right now, wrong in his limbs, his teeth. It reminds him that he can feel things, that there are other people in the world. "Do that again," he commands, and he can't actually compel anyone into action but Peter still leans in and does.

The excruciating agony of decompression sickness hasn't even kicked in yet — Peter hadn't handed him off to Thaddeus this time, had carried Jon to the Captain's cabin and tossed him onto the bed and climbed in with him to warm him. There's blackened salt water on the pillow where Jon coughed it up, and one of them is probably going to roll into it in a moment, but he doesn't even _care_ , it's just so good to be doing something so physical, so human. For there to be another person, pressed against him, sparking off all his synapses.

"Let's warm you up," Peter murmurs, but somehow the rough press and rub of his hands ends up centred between Jon's legs, demanding he be aroused for this.

When Jon is nothing but a whimpering mess of sensation, arousal he hasn't had to deal with so immediately since his college days, Peter holds Jon down into the mattress and his weight is glorious. He savages Jon's neck and shoulders with his teeth and that's good too, Jon gasping all high and pleasured. "Hurt me," he instructs, too far gone to be ashamed, and the masochism isn't new but the recklessness of it is. There could be a knife to his throat and he would just arch his head and beg for the familiar bite of it. 

He doesn't want to die. Death undoubtedly feels like cessation, and he's had so much of that. He wants to be _alive_ , to hurt with how alive he is.

Peter presses a finger bluntly between his cheeks and it burns and Jon

-

He feels full. Even though he vomited up all the food and booze of the trip here into a cloud of filth not long after hitting the water. No, it isn't any sustenance that fills him. There isn't any satiation. The iridescent blackness had poured in bubbling waves down his throat, up his nostrils and into his ears. It's between his legs, too, shifting in, finding every space it can. It's never firm enough to be pleasurable after the first demanding tentacles drag him into the depths — but it's solid enough to be an intrusion. 

Jon wonders if a creature this vast and formless breeds, has any compulsion to breed. Follows that thought, despite its horrific nature, until it simply peters out and he has no more to think about. It's not as though he has any proof, any evidence. There are no books about the mating habits of the impossible entities of the depths.

His chest spasms for a moment in the black, but he doesn't have air to giggle with the madness he feels circling.

-

groans, because he's so empty inside, and he needs it he needs it he needs it.

"I bet Elias is watching in his office and jerking it," says Peter with another finger for emphasis, Jon's heel drumming his ass. "Bet he's jealous," Peter laughs between them as he settles his weight and cores him. Jon's noisy as they start to move together. "Wonder of which of us?"

"Maybe I'll ask him," rasps Jon, darkly, and they both know what he means. Peter laughs, teeth glinting in the cabin's low light.

-

It's a long journey back to shore. Jon spends all of it in Peter's bed, demanding sensation until the man ties his hands to the headboard and tells him, "Archivist, I need a break." He sounds amused and delighted, like he hadn't expected to be worn out, but he also stumbles out of the room like a drunk man and goes to see to his responsibilities. In the past he's struck Jon as a man who takes his duties to his ship and his crew surprisingly seriously. He wonders what's changed.

(Aside, of course, from everything. There doesn't need to be a ritual for the whole world to shift a little to the left, for Jon to look into the mirror and only see a stranger.)

-

It feels good to be on land again. It's only the start of December, but some enterprising soul has started to decorate the shop fronts nearest the docks with Christmas cheer. Jon looks at it with a vague kind of puzzlement, as if he knows he should feel something about it — grumpiness at the endlessly encroaching start of the holiday season, or nostalgia for Christmases past, or warmth for what this one may hold. 

Peter puts his suitcase on the wood next to him. Jon grips the plastic handle and remembers packing it frantically a lifetime ago, dragging it across Heathrow. Hoping that he might have any control left over his life. Such a foolish wish.

"See you next Autumn, Jon," Peter says, threat and promise both.

Jon smiles. "Yes," he says, hollowed out and tired. "I suppose you will."


End file.
